In this handsomely printed and generously illustrated book (14 color plates and 66
black-and-white figures), Julia Boffey has given students of book history an
important study of the five-decade period following Caxton's introduction of printing
into England in 1485. This period, falling between the end of the medieval period and
the beginning of the early modern period, has lacked a full study that brings
together manuscript and print cultures during this fifty-year period. Thus, until the
advent of this book, we have had primarily studies of one form of textual production
or the other, one century or the other. Ralph Hanna's superb London
Literature, for example, examines the types of literature fourteenth-century
readers desired and the manuscript production methods that met those desires.
Boffey's text is further distinguished by her focus upon texts other than those by
the major poets or literature for court circles, texts previously examined in single
studies or overviews.

Boffey opens her book with a striking example of the types of manuscripts still
being produced in the very early sixteenth century by discussing the sumptuous
presentation copy given to Henry VII by Italian astronomer William Parron, another
being presented two years later. These manuscripts represent the continuing
perception of the written book as a prestigious gift. Boffey then traces the impact
of the advent of printing on the culture and acknowledges the important work done by
such other scholars as Elizabeth Eisenstein, while noting that more recent studies
tend to focus more on printed documents than on simply books. Boffey's major
questions guiding her discussion are two: "what perceptions did people have of
printed material after its introduction into England" and "how did these perceptions
determine their own practices in dealing with books and documents, whether as
producers or consumers" (5)? Finding answers to these questions, she admits, is
difficult at best; impressions and responses have rarely survived. Instead, Boffey
turns to those "crucial points of intersection [in these decades] between the
production and use of manuscripts and the production and use of printed materials"
(5).

Boffey organizes the book around a series of small studies, the first chapter
focusing on two similar miscellanies: a 1502 printed book--The Customs
of London--compiled by Richard Arnold, and San Marino, Huntington Library, MS
HM 140, comprised of two separate fifteenth-century manuscripts; each copied by more
than one scribe and combined by the early sixteenth century. The two books in use at
approximately the same time demonstrate that sixteenth-century readers were
accustomed to different kinds of textual production. Perhaps the most challenging and
thoughtful segment of the chapter is Boffey's attempt to define a "London book."
Boffey's approach deftly denotes the difficulty in making such a label possible: the
point of production (Arnold's first printing done in Antwerp, the English printing in
1525; the lack of identification of the hands of the Huntington); the frequent
absence of information about the compiler, sources used, etc.; problems with
localizing mobile scribes or with their copying texts that have been brought to
London; rubrication and decoration done in different times (e.g., the fascinating
hybrid books, some of which, for instance, may place an excised woodcut within a
manuscript). She identifies markers that suggest more definitive evidence of a London
book: local (i.e., London content), works by notable London authors, dialect--even
the confusion resulting from some retained bits of a dialect turned into a London
book. Boffey then applies these criteria to the Arnold printed book, seeing it as a
personal or household compilation that was of a type widespread at the time, and to
the Huntington Manuscript, showing that at the least it was in London for a time.

Chapter 2 focuses on the reception of print and manuscript material, "the
circumstances in which script and print were brought together or kept apart" (44). In
this fascinating and revealing chapter, we are shown the associations of the noted
early printers with scribes and illustrators during this period of transition. For
example, Boffey's investigation of the printer's offsets and inks suggests that the
famous Winchester manuscript of Malory may have resided with Caxton for some time,
even though it was not the copy used for the 1485 printing. Wynkyn de Worde's
printing from manuscript copies and Richard Pynson's work with members of London
mercantile centers, who owned books, perhaps wrote them, dealt in them, lent them to
printers, and perhaps collaborated with them in production, demonstrate the frequent
interchange of print and manuscript copies. Perhaps less commonly known, though, are
the occasions when print works were transferred into script: obvious ones like
student notes or clerks' records, but also short extracts from printed works copied
into personal manuscript anthologies. The combinations of sources--print and
manuscript--to produce final printed texts make source work extremely complex. Some
printed texts (e.g., indulgences and certificates for confession), Boffey shows, were
printed with blank spaces for written names. Furthermore, scribes occasionally
upgraded texts by supplying information missing from printed texts; others painted
over woodcuts, while printed texts were sometimes rubricated and decorated by hand.
The integration of the two forms of production is fully and concretely demonstrated
in this provocative chapter.

In Chapter 3, Boffey focuses upon the pressures and decisions that led to print and
manuscript texts. Boffey notes that London printers "evinced curiously little
enthusiasm for reproducing London chronicles" (85), surmising that continental
printed editions presented a more universal view. Examples of texts found in
manuscript are civic records at the Guildhall and day-to-day records. Bills, posters
and the like are largely in print, the time and labor of hand copying being too
onerous. In 1504, the position of King's Printer was first filled, and Boffey depicts
the production of printed accounts of ceremonies, civic events, and the like that
increased quickly, some produced by Pynson, who was also a King's Printer. Sermons
and lectures were not often copied, but Boffey observes that a number of
relationships were quickly cemented between printers and preachers who underwrote the
printing of missals and processionals. The Bishop of Ely, John Alcock, worked with de
Worde and Pynson, who produced five editions of various sermons between them. Other
pieces, such as political satire and seditious literature, sometimes emanating from
prisons, were necessarily hand copied. Religious reformers often sent manuscript
copies to continental printers, but Boffey also describes the secret manuscript shops
reproducing the works of such people as Tyndale.

Chaper 4 presents the conclusions that can be drawn from an analysis of printed
books in London after Caxton. Boffey examines the holdings of institutions at which
Londoners would find books, the old world of manuscript production still alive in
some forms in them. For example, stationers could buy printed sheets and then arrange
for the finishing off processes of decoration and binding, similar to their functions
as manuscript sellers in the earlier century. Printers would import as well as
produce books, retaining sometimes illuminators and bookbinders. Merchants also sold
books. The prices of manuscript in contrast to printed books are examined in this
chapter, though with little certain conclusion, since prices noted in books are often
vague about what exactly is being priced. Parish churches, when they needed to renew
texts from 1520s on were often printed texts. The holdings of school libraries show a
mix of copied notebooks and printed books. Pynson and de Worde quickly engaged in
printing schoolbooks, Pynson also a key printer for law books. Boffey the describes
the Guildhall's two main collections: the first group--used by the Mayor's Court and
for reference materials--exhibiting many manuscripts (e.g., the famous Liber Horn) with records also showing payment to Pynson for printing books
for the city in 1517; the second group--used mostly by priests of the Guildhall
College--also exhibiting a number of manuscripts, printed books obtained by bequests.
The records of London's religious houses and books possessed by women show a similar
mixture, though research cited by Boffey shows that the women's religious houses were
the "most energetic purchasers of books of all kinds" (141) in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Boffey's discussion of associations between printers and company
networks--Caxton was a member of the Mercer's Company--provides an intriguing insight
into the book world of the period. As she shows, some members of city companies
underwrote printed texts, while at the same time selling, importing, and involving
themselves in the production of printed texts. The Mercers having been the subject of
other studies, Boffey looks at the Drapers, who had among its company people who sold
books and others who acted as stationers and text writers. Boffey's depiction of the
activities of members of the Drapers provides a well-documented and insightful
reading of this group's contributions as members of London's reading and
text-producing public.

Boffy concludes her book in Chapter 5 with a case study of the work of Robert
Fabyan, master of the Drapers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
who compiled and read texts in manuscript and print. Fabyan is perhaps best known for
Fabyan's Chronicle, the earliest version (1504) in two volumes,
each copied by a single scribe. Ironically, as Boffey notes, the first attribution of
the work to Fabyan comes in a printed edition in 1533. Fabyan is also associated with
The Great Chronicle of London. Boffey argues persuasively that
Fabyan seems to have copied both and to have authored the former and at least part of
the latter, building her case upon codicological evidence. The mixture of manuscript
and decorative bits obtained from printed sources, Boffey argues, show that Fabyan
thrived in this world of manuscript and print, the overall impressions of his three
large manuscripts and one incunable showing "someone who took a striking degree of
pleasure in mixing elements of printed books and of manuscripts together" (169). This
full case study of the readings and sources, the productions, and the later uses of
Fabyan's works (as well as the resulting decisions that went into reproduction in
print or manuscript) is an absorbing and enlightening portrait of the members of the
reading public in London.

This exceptionally well-researched and clearly written book, complete in its
evocative and provocative study of this often-overlooked fifty-year period, is the
kind of work we have come to expect from Julia Boffey. Medievalists, early
modernists, and students of the history of the book should all have this text on
their shelves. Aside from the masterful and full presentation of the production
methods of texts and the texts readers were obtaining in the decades after Caxton's
first printings, Boffey's book is an intriguing and enlightening study of London's
book culture in this transitional period, one to which students of the book will
return repeatedly for its wealth of details set in a sharply focused study.